A powerful article on Israel and a review by Chris Hedges of Max Blumenthal’s “GOLIATH: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.”

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa.

Its democracy—which was always exclusively for Jews—has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism. Many of Israel’s most enlightened and educated citizens—1 million of them—have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, has become an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy.

And yet, the hard truths about Israel remain largely unspoken. Liberal supporters of Israel decry its excesses.They wring their hands over the tragic necessity of airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon or the demolition of Palestinian homes.They assure us that they respect human rights and want peace. But they react in inchoate fury when the reality of Israel is held up before them.This reality implodes the myth of the Jewish state.

It exposes the cynicism of a state whose real goal is, and always has been, the transfer, forced emigration or utter subjugation and impoverishment of Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied territories. Reality shatters the fiction of a peace process. Reality lays bare the fact that Israel routinely has used deadly force against unarmed civilians, including children, to steal half the land on the West Bank and crowd forcibly displaced Palestinians into squalid, militarized ghettos while turning their land and homes over to Jewish settlers. Reality exposes the new racial laws adopted by Israel as those once advocated by the fanatic racist Meir Kahane.

Reality unveils the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, the largest detention center in the world. Reality mocks the lie of open, democratic debate, including in the country’s parliament, the Knesset, where racist diatribes and physical threats, often enshrined into law, are used to silence and criminalize the few who attempt to promote a civil society. Liberal Jewish critics inside and outside Israel, however, desperately need the myth, not only to fetishize Israel but also to fetishize themselves. Strike at the myth and you unleash a savage vitriol, which in its fury exposes the self-adulation and latent racism that lie at the core of modern Zionism.

There are very few intellectuals or writers who have the tenacity and courage to confront this reality. This is what makes Max Blumenthal’s “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel” one of the most fearless and honest books ever written about Israel. Blumenthal burrows deep into the dark heart of Israel. The American journalist binds himself to the beleaguered and shunned activists, radical journalists and human rights campaigners who are the conscience of the nation, as well as Palestinian families in the West Bank struggling in vain to hold back Israel’s ceaseless theft of their land. Blumenthal, in chapter after chapter, methodically rips down the facade. And what he exposes, in the end, is a corpse.

“Unarmed civilians were torn to pieces with flechette darts sprayed from tank shells,” Blumenthal writes. “Several other children covered in burns from white phosphorous chemical weapon rounds were taken to hospitals; a few were found dead with bizarre wounds after being hit with experimentalDense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) bombs designed to dissolve into the body and rapidly erode internal soft tissue. A group of women were shot to death while waving a white flag; another family was destroyed by a missile while eating lunch; and Israeli soldiers killed Ibrahim Awajah, an eight-year-old child. His mother, Wafaa, told the documentary filmmaker Jen Marlowe that soldiers used his corpse for target practice. Numerous crimes like these were documented across the Gaza Strip.”

By the end of the assault, with 1,400 dead, nearly all civilians, Gaza lay in ruins. The Israeli air force purposely targeted Gaza’s infrastructure, including power plants, to reduce Gaza to a vast, overcrowded, dysfunctional slum. Israel, Blumenthal notes, destroyed “80 percent of all arable farmland in the coastal strip, bombing the strip’s largest flour mill, leveling seven concrete factories, shelling a major cheese factory, and shooting up a chicken farm, killing thirty-one thousand chickens.”

“Twelve [years old] and up, you are allowed to shoot. That’s what they tell us,” an Israeli sniper told Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass in 2004 at the height of the Second Intifada, Blumenthal writes. “This is according to what the IDF [Israel Defense Force] says to its soldiers. I do not know if this is what the IDF says to the media,” the sniper was quoted as saying.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, including months in Gaza and the West Bank. I lived for two years in Jerusalem. Many of the closest friends I made during my two decades overseas are Israeli. Most of them are among the Israeli outcasts that Blumenthal writes about, men and women whose innate decency and courage he honors throughout his book. They are those who, unlike the Israeli leadership and a population inculcated with racial hatred, sincerely want to end occupation, restore the rule of law and banish an ideology that creates moral hierarchies with Arabs hovering at the level of animal as Jews—especially Jews of European descent—are elevated to the status of demigods. It is a measure of Blumenthal’s astuteness as a reporter that he viewed Israel through the eyes of these outcasts, as well as the Palestinians, and stood with them as they were arrested, tear-gassed and fired upon by Israeli soldiers. There is no other honest way to tell the story about Israel. And this is a very honest book.

“Goliath” is made up of numerous vignettes, some only a few pages long, that methodically build a picture of Israel, like pieces fit into a puzzle. It is in the details that Israel’s reality is exposed. The Israeli army, Blumenthal points out in his first chapter, “To the Slaughter,” employs a mathematical formula to limit outside food deliveries to Gaza to keep the caloric levels of the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped inside its open air prison just above starvation; a government official later denied that he had joked in a meeting that the practice is “like an appointment with a dietician.” The saturation, 22-day bombing of Gaza that began on Dec. 27, 2008, led by 60 F-16 fighter jets, instantly killed 240 Palestinians, including scores of children. Israel’s leading liberal intellectuals, including the writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, blithely supported the wholesale murder of Palestinian civilians. And while Israelis blocked reporters from entering the coastal Gaza Strip—forcing them to watch distant explosions from Israel’s Parash Hill, which some reporters nicknamed “the Hill of Shame”—the army and air force carried out atrocity after atrocity, day after day, crimes that were uncovered only after the attack was over and the press blockade lifted.

This massive aerial and ground assault against a defenseless civilian population that is surrounded by the Israeli army, a population without an organized military, air force, air defenses, navy, heavy artillery or mechanized units, caused barely a ripple of protest inside Israel from the left or the right. It was part of the ongoing business of slaughtering the other.

The 2008 murderous rampage is not, as Blumenthal understands, an anomaly. It is the overt policy of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who advocates “a system of open apartheid.” Israel, as Blumenthal points out, has not lifted its state of emergency since its foundation. It has detained at least 750,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 women, in its prisons since 1967. It currently holds more than 4,500 political prisoners, including more than 200 children and 322 people jailed without charges, Blumenthal writes, including those it has labeled “administrative detainees.” Israel has a staggering 99.74 percent conviction rate for these so-called security prisoners, a figure that any totalitarian state would envy.

Blumenthal cites a survey of Jewish Israeli attitudes on the Gaza bombing, known as Operation Cast Lead. The survey, by Daniel Bar-Tal, a political psychologist from Tel Aviv University, concluded that the public’s “consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and insensitivity to their suffering.” Bar-Tal tells Blumenthal “these attitudes are the product of indoctrination.” And Blumenthal sets out to chronicle the poison of this indoctrination and what it has spawned in Israeli society.

The racist narrative, once the domain of the far right and now the domain of the Israeli government and the mainstream, demonizes Palestinians and Arabs, as well as all non-Jews. Non-Jews, according to this propaganda, will forever seek the annihilation of the Jewish people. The Holocaust, in which Israeli victimhood is sanctified, is seamlessly conflated with Palestinian and Arab resistance to occupation. The state flies more than 25 percent of Israeli 11th-graders to Poland to tour Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps a year before they start army service. They are told that the goal of Arabs, along with the rest of the non-Jewish world, is another Auschwitz. And the only thing standing between Israelis and a death camp is the Israeli army. Israeli high schools show films such as “Sleeping With the Enemy” to warn students about dating non-Jews, especially Arabs. Racist books such as “Torat Ha’Melech,” or “The King’s Torah,” are given to soldiers seeking rabbinical guidance on the rules of engagement. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, the authors of the 230-page book, inform soldiers that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and may have to be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments [of Noah] … there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Shapira and Elitzur write. The rabbis claim that under Jewish law “there is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

These narratives of hatred make any act of deadly force by the Israeli army permissible, from the shooting of Palestinian children to the 2010 killing by Israeli commandos of nine unarmed activists on the Turkish boat the Mavi Marmara.The activists were part of a flotilla of six boats bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. The Israeli propaganda machine claimed that the small flotilla was a covert terror convoy. Never mind that the Mavi Marmara was in international waters when it was attacked. Never mind that no one on the boat, or any of the five other boats, was armed. Never mind that the boats were thoroughly searched before they left for Gaza. The Israeli lie was trumpeted while every camera, video and tape recorder, computer and cellphone of the activists on board was seized and destroyed—or in a few cases sold by Israeli soldiers when they got back to Israel—while those on the boats were towed to an Israeli port and detained in isolation. The ceaseless stoking of fear and racial hatred—given full vent by the Israeli government and media in the days after the Mavi Marmara incident—has served to empower racist political demagogues such as Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, a camp follower of Meir Kahane. It has also effectively snuffed out Israel’s old left-wing Zionist establishment.

“In Israel you have three systems of laws,” the Israeli Arab politician Ahmed Tibi observes in the Blumenthal book. “One is democracy for 80 percent of the population. It is democracy for Jews. I call it an ethnocracy or you could call it a Judocracy. The second is racial discrimination for 20 percent of the population, the Israeli Arabs. The third is apartheid for the population in the West Bank and Gaza. This includes two sets of governments, one for the Palestinians and one for the settlers. Inside Israel there is not yet apartheid but we are being pushed there with … new laws.”

As Blumenthal documents, even Israeli Jews no longer live in a democracy. The mounting state repression against human rights advocates, journalists and dissidents has reached the proportions of U.S. Homeland Security. The overtly racist cant of the political elite and the masses—“Death to Arabs” is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches—has emboldened mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, to carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.’ ” And all who denounce the steady march of Israel toward fascism—including Jewish academics—are attacked in organized campaigns as being insufficiently Zionist. They are branded as terrorists or collaborators with terrorists. As a headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz read: “The settlers are the real government of Israel.”

“Woody [a law school graduate from New York] became my initial liaison to Tel Aviv’s radical left, introducing me to a loose-knit band of a few hundred anarchists, disillusioned ex-soldiers, disaffected children of ultra-Zionists, queers, academics, and generally idealistic and disillusioned young people who came of age during the Second Intifada when the liberal Zionist ‘peace camp’ closed ranks with the militaristic right wing,” Blumenthal writes. “This tiny band of social deviants comprised the only grouping of people I met who sincerely embraced multiculturalism and who took concrete action against the discriminatory foundations of their country’s political apparatus. Right-wingers and many Jewish Israelis who considered themselves part of the social mainstream referred to members of the radical left as smolinim, which simply means ‘leftists,’ but the word carried a deeply insulting connotation of an unacceptable caste, an Other. As branded social outcasts, inflexible in their principles, disdainful of ordinary politics, and brazen in their racial liberalism they resembled nothing so much as the pre-Civil War abolitionists.”

The late Amnon Dankner, the former editor of Maariv, one of Israel’s major newspapers, Blumenthal notes, denounced “neo-Nazi expressions in the Knesset” and “entire parties whose tenor and tone arouse feelings of horror and terrifying memories.” David Landau, the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, has called on Israelis to boycott the Knesset “to stand against the wave of fascism that has engulfed the Zionist project.” And Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and journalist, says: “Israel’s very existence is threatened by fascism.”

The disillusionment among idealistic young immigrants to Israel dots the book. As one example, Canadian David Sheen is recorded as saying that everything he had known about Israel and Palestinians was, in Blumenthal’s words, “a fantasy cultivated through years of heavy indoctrination.” But perhaps what is saddest is that Israel has, and has always had, within its population intellectuals, including the great scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who sought to save Israel from itself.
Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called “the conscience of Israel,” warned that if Israel did not separate church and state it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult.

“Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” said Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of the Jewish state and any hope of democracy. “Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution.” He foresaw that “the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.” He warned that the rise of a virulent racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn “concentration camps” for the occupied and that, in his words, “Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

But few, then or now, cared to listen. This is why Blumenthal’s new book is so important.

About the Author : Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, has written twelve books, including the New York Times best seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Some of his other books include “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. In 2011, Nation Books published a collection of Hedges’ Truthdig columns called “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”
Hedges previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

8 COMMENTS

If anyone needs to provide a summary of all that is wrong, BUT NEVER REPORTED in Israel, then this book critique by Chris Hedges is a good place to start. He deserves to be congratulated for such a good effort.

Anyone well informed on the state of play in Israel……. the apartheid environment, the inhumanity, the acceptance by the greatest majority of Israelis living there and then supported by probably 90% of Jews living elsewhere because they either don't know, don't want to know or just plain don't care, are already familiar with the facts in Mr. Hedges detailed writings in this review, facts of which they are very familiar, indeed. Even so, it is still disturbing to see it all chronicled in such a way, one crime after another.

It is in fact these details that have created in the readers the long time commitment to doing something, anything they can to right these wrongs. These pages and others like them, attest to that every day.

My ability to read Max Blumenthal's book therefore is just not a possibility. I know of the crime and the attitudes inside the country and am more than aware of the level of unpatriotic Jews who have migrated purposefully to other countries to spread the evil word and to try and influence the foreign policy departments of most countries to support Israel's policies in the UN using the US with their tainted veto, (70 times to date).

The recent vote on Palestine in the UN General Assembly which was an outstanding success (for decent peoples, that is), saw Israelis months before wandering to every corner of the world, threatening, bribing any little country, anywhere, to support their ‘NO’ vote. The promise of tourism for little Pacific Island countries, investment in others, purchases of specific goods for consumption, almost every dirty trick in the book which only won them just one vote from that area coming from a country that probably wouldn’t even know where the stolen land of Israel is.

No one was surprised at this ploy by Israel, A country that engages in the dehumanisation of a whole race of people who they have run roughshod over for 66 years, is capable of anything at all.

It certainly makes one think once again on the quality of Americans who have allowed this to happen, even to this day, parroting the very same words where have spewed from the mouth of Netanyahu yesterday. Such is their subservience to Israel. The reason why they are regarded with such dislike where they were once respected. No more.

Sold out is their decency, fairness and the plain truth of the matter.

So if you have a strong stomach, the book would be most revealing by all accounts.

Marc Ginsberg (who was raised in Israel & environs and calls himself a proud Jewish zionist) appeared on C Span on the first day of 2014, the day that may mark the tribe's first circuit of the town of Jericho USA, which the Jewish god promised his chosen people would be theirs, and that to kill every man, woman, child and animal in the village was his divine will for them.

Several callers to C Span called out Ginsberg's mendacity and critiqued Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Those callers were cut off, of course, but one caller was able to get in mention of Max Blumenthal's book, "Goliath."

The C Span schedule is increasingly Jew-heavy — Ginsberg's appearance was followed by segments featuring Shane Goldmacher discussing top political stories for 2014, and Geoffrey Mankoff to talk about Russia.

C Span has three television channels and a radio broadcast, for a total of 96 hours of programming each day. On the first day of January 2014, at least 17 of those hours featured a Jewish subject or guest.

I suppose the critique of Israel and Zionism, even as a book review, is as acceptable in the West today as the late Chavez waiving Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony and Survival was from the UN podium.

What is clearly not acceptable however is the mention that the Balfour Declaration is issued to Lord Rothschild; any perceptive analysis of that most treacherous piece of document; any critical examination of the anomaly that what forces might have prevailed upon the British Empire to give away land grant to the Jews specifically in that name, land which wasn’t even theirs to grant to begin with, and to a people for whom they had no love lost throughout the ages, and nor were they born there, etc.

The other acceptable counterpart to that is the core-axioms and all presuppositions of empire and its imperial mobilization which are equally taboo topic in the West, both for Chris Hedges, and for all the rest of most lauded dissent of Westerndom and their mentally colonized territories in Easterndom.

They commonly retain the presuppositions echoed by empire and all its instruments, specifically, that 9/11 was the work of OBL. Their silence on WTC-7 demolition alone bespeaks their manufactured status because they posit, just like the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, that it was the enemy from outside who attacked America on 9/11, and all merely argue the reasons from “blowback” to “incompetence”, and the best way to deal with that enemy from over there. The same red herrings are thrown to the public mind by this genre of dissent as that thrown by those who manufacture consent. This is why I called it Manufacturing Dissent – dissent that is a priori designed to have no efficacy because it judiciously avoids going outside the discourse space crafted by empire. Within it, vigorous dissent is permitted to give the illusion of free-speech and western freedoms, all explained most coherently by Noam Chomsky himself. But he himself practices it, as does evidently, Chris Hedges, It is all examined in detail in the above two links, where the first one is direct examination of Chris Hedges speak.

Just by reading this brief review by Chris Hedges of Blumenthal’s book, I can say that it is perhaps best captured by My Confusion series where I lament the hazard of independent thinking for the lowly goy — for it only leads to more confusion:

[3] humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/p/rothschild.html

I advance the argument in all the above missives, that manufactured dissent is designed to create some splendid red herrings for the activists, especially the Palestinian activists and the Palestinian leadership, to follow. They would be wise to not fall for it, as they evidently have done time and again over the past sixty years.

Indeed, it is worth observing that the critique of Israel and Zionism is most fashionable and most permissible today. It does not lead to assassination by Mossad, even though it may appear to be against the grain. Especially by the conscionable Jews themselves. Just as it is permissible to critique the “empire” and survive CIA’s assassination and drone attacks. You can get away dumping on their dystopic Jewish construction in Zionistan just as easily as the late iconoclast of Venezuela, president Chavez, got away waiving Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony and Survival from the UN podium a couple of years ago. It did not hurt Chomsky’s book sales either who is instead anointed by the most visible instrument of empire, the New York Times, as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”.

That is not how the struggle for Palestine is going to be effective, by staying silent on the real harbingers, the real prime-movers, who equally own and control both the empire’s imperial policies, its instruments which alternately demonize or heroize as necessary to play the tune of the Mighty Wurlitzer, and also its political front-runners; and control their pet project of Zionistan in Palestine and its political front-runners and its lobbies worldwide from behind the scene. The Jewish control, and the well-intentioned but ignorant Western goy’s control, of the Palestinian narrative most diabolically engineers the neutralization of their struggle — just as they do themselves by staying ignorant of their own history and letting the Western Jews and the Western goy tell it:

Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam has introduced a Bill that would punish any institution of higher education in the USA that participates in boycott of Israel.

I’m in favor of the Bill if it genuinely seeks to do what its sponsors claim they wish to do; namely, to ensure and promote academic freedom at colleges and universities. If the Bill's sponsors really mean that, then the Bill should be broadened to protect educational institutions in the USA as well.

(There's a certain irony in the fact that one would have to remind a US representative to protect USA institutions, but you go to Congress with the representatives that are bought, not the one’s you thought you elected).

What would be the implications of extending protections of academic freedom to USA institutions?

The Bill would open up discourse on the Holocaust to any and all revisions and interpretations.

As it stands, and among other things, the Bill provides that

“Discriminatory boycotts violate the principle of academic freedom guaranteed by the United States. .

“. . .an institution of higher education shall not be eligible to receive funds or any other form of financial assistance under this Act if the Secretary determines that such institution . . .adopts a policy or resolution, issues a statement, or otherwise formally establishes the restriction of discourse, cooperation, exchange, or any other involvement . .”

Currently, nearly all educational institutions in the United States of America labor under a restriction of discourse concerning the wars in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Only one narrative discourse of those events is permitted — the narrative prescribed by groups such as ADL. Compliance with and deviation from that narrative is "monitored" by an office in the US State Department. This amounts to promulgation of a dogma. To the extent that it is enforced by the power of government, it is the equivalent of state sponsored and enforced religion.

Numerous highly talented researchers and historians have lost their careers because their historical research turned up facts and evidence that were contrary to the prescribed narrative.

The people of the United States have suffered the embarrassment of watching journalists from their nation demand of the leaders of other sovereign nations, “Do you deny the holocaust?” Apparently, United States of America is the state sponsor of a religious dogma that all other nations must subscribe to under pain of (in the case of Iran) the threat of starvation of its people and the overthrow of its government.

So by all means, Mr. Roskam, promote a Bill to protect academic freedom as guaranteed by the United States. Include unambiguous language to ensure that NO educational institution in the United States may use taxpayer funds to promote, endorse or enforce a dogmatized narrative of historical events, and that restrictions on the freedom to research and interpret historical events such as the Holocaust will result in suspension of taxpayer funding to that institution.

@ Zahir Ebrahim don’t think it didn’t escape attention that you use the word “goy” in your dissertation.
goy
(goi)
n. pl. goy·im (goim) or goys Offensive
Used as a disparaging term for one who is not a Jew.
Now, you’re a “smart” guy. Obviously you take prided in being a “smart” guy. But you’re going to have to do the same thing that I did when I left academia and got into the real world and lose that style of writing. You bore people to tears. You’re writing comments in a forum on the internet for crying out loud, not submitted scholarly papers to an academic review board for approval. Get with the program. Otherwise, you’re doomed to irrelevance because nobody has the time, patience and often as not, the capability to translate what you’re saying into plain English. As far as the book review goes, it’s pretty good. I had the book a few weeks ago from my local library and it just basically confirms what I already knew. Jews for the most part are misanthropic psychos that are a danger to the whole human race.

Well-said in every respect, John.
My teachers always instructed us to use “50-cent” words rather than “nickel” words, but my reaction to Mr. Ebrahim’s comments was identical to yours: one big continuous yawn.
And while I’d like to support the author Mr. Hedges, I probably won’t read the book, John, for the very reason you stated: I already know. The “misanthropic psychos” observation on your part was spot-on.
Suki, Reluctant Amerikan >^..^<

All the foregoing a reminder: Do consider reading Jan Assmann (Egyptology; Heidelberg; retired) “What Price Monotheism?” — wherein he suggests that as soon as people
carve up reality by writing these books that specify how things are and have got to be henceforth, they create loci for
bloodshed and violence.